More on AI and the Turing Test May 20, 2018

It turns out that most people who care to comment are, to use the common phrase, creeped out at the thought of not knowing whether they are talking to an AI or a human being. I get that, although I don’t think I’m myself bothered by such a notion. After all, what do we know about people during a casual phone conversation? Many of them probably sound like robots to us anyway.

And this article in the New York Times notes that Google was only able to accomplish this feat by severely limiting the domain in which the AI could interact with – in this case, making dinner reservations or a hair appointment. The demonstration was still significant, but isn’t a truly practical application, even within a limited domain space.

Well, that’s true. The era of an AI program interacting like a human across multiple domains is far away, even with the advances we’ve seen over the last few years. And this is why I even doubt the viability of self-driving cars anytime soon. The problem domains encountered by cars are enormously complex, far more so than any current tests have attempted. From road surface to traffic situation to weather to individual preferences, today’s self-driving cars can’t deal with being in the wild.

You may retort that all of these conditions are objective and highly quantifiable, making it possible to anticipate and program for. But we come across driving situations almost daily that have new elements that must be instinctively integrated into our body of knowledge and acted upon. Computers certainly have the speed to do so, but they lack a good learning framework to identify critical data and integrate that data into their neural network to respond in real time.

Author Gary Marcus notes that what this means is that the deep learning approach to AI has failed. I laughed when I came to the solution proposed by Dr. Marcus – that we return to the backward-chaining rules-based approach of two decades ago. This was what I learned during much of my graduate studies, and was largely given up on in the 1990s as unworkable. Building layer upon layer of interacting rules was tedious and error-prone, and it required an exacting understanding of just how backward chaining worked.

Ultimately, I think that the next generation of AI will incorporate both types of approaches. The neural network to process data and come to a decision, and a rules-based system to provide the learning foundation and structure.